Posted by giuliomagnifico 16 hours ago
Imagine you are seeing a pendulum clock and it makes a "tick" on one extreme and "tock" on the other.
When they first started doing animation + sound they noticed that if you play the "tock" sound at the exact same time the pendulum hit the extreme, people would think it was delayed.
Research showed that humans required a small amount of time to "context switch" from one stimulus to another. I think it's about 1/16th of a second.
Some interesting other observations about time perception here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_perception
Whenever I’m in multiple conversations at once in a social setting, I think of Pythagoras
A long time ago, in my 20's, I found out it's easy for me to think in two streams as long as they operated in different languages. I could talk to my colleagues in Hebrew and answer emails in English at the same time.
Surprisingly, writing and speaking in the same language is not as easy for me. Possible, but requires some mental effort to keep the buffers separated.
I've always been jealous of people who can play the drums and sing or play piano with both hands and a foot while singing.
I would constantly hear people around the cube farm stumbling through sentences because they could hear themselves through a neighbors computer with a slight delay.
Its def a spectrum.
In the easiest look at people like me who complain very quick if something is wrong like to warm to cold to sweaty etc. and others not even ackknowliding it at all
As is talking whilst listening to another conversation - eg. Giving a lecture whilst eves dropping on the people talking at the back of the lecture theatre.
However, having a two way conversation with one person whilst listening to another is really hard.
Not sure why.
Its a kind of context juggling mechanism in both cases, and it feels like the same mental muscle being exercised in both cases.
I wonder if there is a worthwhile experiment to be conducted wherein an EEG'ed pinball player gets to play pinball with easy multi ball targets, while also listening to German and English speakers, and then passing a test at the end of it .. because I sure have been preparing for that kind of scenario lately ..